There are always a few deadline trades made for clerical reasons rather than with a pennant race in mind. This is one of them:

Rangers get:
RHP Nate Jones
$1 million in international bonus space
Cash

White Sox get:
RHP Joseph Jarneski
RHP Ray Castro

The oft-injured Jones, who has a 2020 team option and a mutual option for 2021, will be on the shelf for the rest of 2019 due to forearm surgery performed in late May. It’s possible that a surprisingly competitive Rangers club will keep Jones around in the hopes that his stuff returns from yet another injury. More likely, Texas’ 40-man situation will lead them to decline his option. Read the rest of this entry »

For the second time this month, catcher Martín Maldonado has been traded, and for the second time in just over a year, he’ll join the Astros. The well-traveled backstop, who began this season filling in for the injured Salvador Perez as the Royals’ starter, played just four games with the Cubs after being acquired on July 15.

Astros get:

C Martín Maldonado

Cubs get:

IF/OF Tony Kemp

It’s fair to say that Maldonado, who turns 33 on August 16 and has also spent time with the Brewers (2011-16) and Angels (2017-18), is a consistent hitter — consistently subpar. He’s batting .217/.285/.349 in 276 plate appearances this year, with six homers and a 72 wRC+; that line bears an uncanny resemblance to his career one (.219/.288/.350, 72 WRC+). He actually went hitless (0-for-11 with two walks) in his brief Chicago stint, which began when the Cubs obtained him from the Royals on July 15, complementing their placement of Willson Contreras on the injured list due to a right arch strain. Contreras has since returned, and with young Victor Caratini serving as a useful backup, there wasn’t room for Maldonado. Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago, Jesús Aguilar took the starting first base job in Milwaukee away from Eric Thames, hitting 35 homers and posting a 135 wRC+ as the Brewers rolled to a division title. This year, Aguilar’s struggles opened the job back up for Thames; Aguilar has been relegated to the weak side of a platoon. A strong month of July in part-time duty wasn’t enough to play him back into a starting role with the Brewers, but it was enough to get the Tampa Bay Rays interested and willing to part with a pitcher the Brewers can use for their own pennant drive. As first reported by Jeff Passan:

Brewers Receive

• RHP Jake Faria

Rays Receive

• 1B Jesús Aguilar

For the Rays, the need for a right-handed bat is obvious. The left-handed Austin Meadows and Nathaniel Lowe have been getting starts at first base and designated hitter against lefties, with Ji-Man Choi only playing against righties and catcher Travis D’Arnaud getting time at first as well. Aguilar and his righty bat should be able to relieve some of the poor matchups the Rays have found themselves in. Aguilar has bad splits against lefties this season, but that’s more likely a product of generally hitting poorly and some randomness than weird reverse platoon splits. And while his 2019 performance has been wanting, with an 82 wRC+, he’s shown some signs of putting things together over the last month, as the rolling wRC+ graph shows.

Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Parker, who signed with the Phillies as a free agent today for terms not yet disclosed, struck out 33.9% of the batters he faced as an Angel in 2017 and walked just 6.3%. That performance earned him two consecutive one-year, $1.8 million deals: one with the Angels, for 2018, and one with the Twins for this year. Parker wasn’t all that effective in Minnesota, though, posting a 5.35 FIP over 36.1 innings pitched, and he lost Rocco Baldelli’s confidence in July, earning just six appearances after getting 12 in June. Now he’s a Phillie, after the Twins designated him for assignment on July 24 and he cleared waivers three days later.

The problem in 2019 appears on the surface to be velocity, especially on the fastball. That pitch was averaging 93.9 mph just two years ago, then dropped down to 92.8 last year and 92 so far this year. Parker can succeed without a fastball at 94 — he posted a 2.90 FIP over 46 innings with the Cubs in 2013 while it sat at 92.8 — but he threw his curveball nearly a third of the time back then, and that pitch has never been particularly effective. In late 2018, he added a cut fastball that he now throws about 7% of the time, almost entirely at the expense of his four-seamer, but the overall package just hasn’t come together. His strikeout rate and swinging strike rate are both down even as contact against him is up:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays and Jays pulled off a minor trade on Sunday, sending utilityman Eric Sogard to Tampa Bay for a player or players to be named later, or a player or players to be named soon.

Sogard is a good example of a player who wrings the most out of limited physical tools. You won’t often see him crushing deep homers with drool-worthy exit velocities. Like David Fletcher of the Angels, Sogard’s game is a bit of a throwback to a more contact-oriented game. Of active players with at least 500 plate appearances, Sogard has been the second-best at making contact with pitches in the strike zone, behind only Michael Brantley.

Sogard’s .300/.363/.477 triple-slash line (and 123 wRC+) this season is surprising, though not nearly as surprising as the 10 homers he’s hit. While 10 homers doesn’t exactly put Sogard into Pete Alonso territory, it’s an impressive total through the end of July for a 33-year-old who entered the season with just 11 career round-trippers. He may be an example of a player who is getting the most out of MLB’s different-but-not-different-swears-Rob-Manfred baseball; Statcast’s xSLG number gives Sogard just a .346 slugging percentage. The culprit is that Sogard still isn’t hitting the ball hard, with an 84.4 mph exit velocity and only three barrels. Despite that, more of his balls than usual have snuck over the right field fence.

After knee surgery cost Sogard his 2016 season, he was forced to settle for a minor-league contract and the chance to compete for a bench spot with the Brewers in 2017. Sogard posted pleasantly surprising production while filling in for Jonathan Villar when the latter was dealing with back pain in June of that year; his .273/.393/.378 line was enough to get him a major league contract with the Brewers in 2018, but he played poorly and was released by Milwaukee in July.

Neither Steamer or ZiPS were excited about Sogard coming into 2019, projecting a wRC+ of 79 and 69 respectively. The rest of baseball wasn’t much more excited; Sogard signed a minor-league contract with the Blue Jays in December. The projection systems now see him as a .250-.260 hitter with an OBP around .330 and a high .300s slugging percentage, which is a promising enough line for him to have value for a contender looking for depth. Sogard is an excellent fit for the Rays; they don’t need him to play much shortstop, a position where Sogard is stretched, but with many of the team’s second and third base options currently injured (Brandon Lowe, Yandy Diaz, Daniel Robertson, Christian Arroyo), Tampa will find a lot of use for him in coming weeks. I might be inclined to promote Kean Wong from Triple-A Durham, but this is a short-term addition, and the Rays have good reason to pick the safer option in a pennant race.

The cost for adding Sogard is likely to be a minimal one. While there have been conflicting rumor-inations about the players in return, it strikes me that no matter who’s ultimately identified, it’s likely that we’re talking low-level organizational players. If there were prospects of significance involved, I suspect the Rays would have considered promoting Wong more seriously.

Sogard’s acquisition is a low-key signing, but he’ll provide value to the Rays for the next two months, and the trade seems likely to be reasonable for both sides. While I reserve the right to change my opinion if the Rays give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay, they’re not going to give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay.

Position: Data Quality Engineer, Baseball Systems

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Description:
The Minnesota Twins are seeking a Data Quality Engineer to join the Baseball Research and Development group. This position offers wide-ranging exposure to current programming methods and frameworks in a fast-paced agile environment. With creativity and passion, this candidate will collaborate with the Baseball Operations staff to ensure good data hygiene across a growing set of disparate data sources. This position requires an intuitive and exacting passion for data detective work. By identifying patterns that affect data quality and by working directly with data scientists, the candidate will help to develop, deliver, and maintain tools to enhance model and decision accuracy. This position requires independent curiosity and a commitment to achieving excellence within a team framework. Strong communication and interpersonal skills will enable the candidate to enjoy engaging relationships with product users.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Build data quality assurance tools and procedures to identify and correct data inaccuracies.
• Design, maintain, and support data warehouses for reporting and analysis.
• Develop, optimize, and automate data workflows and pipelines ensuring data integrity and quality from external data integrations.
• Support the individuals of the Baseball Operations team by providing assistance and education on best practices when querying the data warehouse.
• Work with data scientists to ensure models and analyses follow best practice for accessing the data and are properly integrated into scheduled data processing workflows.
• Explore emerging technologies and recommend new tools and techniques for collecting and processing data.
• Develop visualization tools and reports that showcase research findings in creative, effective ways for a variety of different end users and use cases.
• Use an agile software development approach for quick roll-outs combined with incremental improvement process to existing systems and environments.
• Provide courteous and timely first-level contact and problem resolution for all Baseball Department users.

Qualifications, Skills, and Abilities:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field or equivalent work experience.
• Software development experience, including requirements definition, design, development, testing, implementation, and iterative improvement.
• Expertise with SQL, relational databases, database design, and data cleaning techniques.
• Ability to process and transform data from a variety of sources and formats.
• Experience with C#, Java, Python, R or other similar language that interacts with data.
• Knowledge of data visualization packages such as Plotly or ggplot is a plus.
• Proficiency evaluating and improving the performance of SQL queries.
• Understand software development best practices and long-term maintainability of code.
• 2+ years of relevant work experience.
• Strong work ethic, curiosity, initiative, and problem-solving skills.
• Open mindedness to learn new technologies and embrace different ways of thinking.
• Passion for baseball is preferred; passion for problem solving is required.

Physical Requirements:

• Ability to lift and transport items up to 55 lbs.
• Must be able to sit for extended periods of time.
• Must be able to move throughout all areas and levels of the ballpark.
• Ability to relocate to the Twins Cities area.

To Apply:
External applicants should apply using the application found here.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Minnesota Twins.

If you looked at the eighth inning play-by-play of Wednesday’s game between the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays, you might have spotted something unusual, though not that unusual:

The unusual part is that Adam Kolarek pitched to two batters in the inning but did not do so consecutively. This isn’t that unusual. The Rays have employed a similar strategy before. Joe Madden has done it with the Cubs. Whitey Herzog did it with the Cardinals back in the 1980s. It may be unconventional, but it isn’t against the rules. It should not cause great delays in games. It did, however, cause an issue in this game. After Kolarek had moved to first base, Chaz Roe got Mookie Betts to fly out for the second out of the frame. Then Kolarek moved from first back to the mound, and trouble ensued.

Instead of seeing baseball on their screens, fans saw baseball types standing around.

The umps are befuddled:

Alex Cora is mad:

Kevin Cash isn’t mad, he’s just disappointed:

The umps don’t want to hear anymore from either manager and start a silent disco:

Finally, Angel Hernandez goes to the Red Sox dugout to see if Alex Cora really does have BINGO:

The switch was a little tricky, but come on. It shouldn’t have taken this long. To give some sense of how lengthy the delay was, go read my piece where I predicted what will happen at the trade deadline with scenarios for all 30 teams. Back? Good. Now listen to one of your favorite songs of standard radio single length, let’s say “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Finished? Okay, now back to the game action:

One pitch and one out to end the inning. Commercial break and then back to more game action, right? I have bad news:

So what did everyone think of the silent disco?

Some spicy lineup card action:

Someone just asked Alex Cora if his refrigerator was running:

Can I interest you in a different lineup card?

The Rays dugout is absolutely riveted:

Maybe they missed seeing the lineup card the first time?

In the time between when the pitch that ended the top of the eighth was thrown and the action in the bottom of the eighth actually commenced, you could have read Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel’s announcement that farm system rankings are now on THE BOARD and this Ben Clemens piece on Andrew Miller. In all, fans saw one pitch in about 23 minutes. The delay was not caused by an illegal move per se, but by the umpire’s lineup card not reflecting quickly enough which spot Adam Kolarek was taking in the lineup. That decision would have been up to Kevin Cash if he so chose; otherwise the umpire gets discretion. But Alex Cora believed the umpire didn’t put Kolarek in the lineup at the time of the change and protested the game.

The Rays won 3-2. The rest of us weren’t so lucky.

In November of last year, Craig Edwards published new research on how to value prospects by Future Value tier. We’ve used that research in conjunction with our prospect evaluations to assess the value of all 30 teams’ farm systems and arrive at our farm system rankings. Starting today, those rankings and valuations are available to view on The BOARD in the Farm Ranking tab. These rankings will automatically update as we move prospects between Future Value tiers, prospects change systems following a trade, or prospects graduate and lose prospect eligibility.

Within that tab, you’ll find:

• A team’s rank
• The value of a team’s system
• A count of how many prospects a team has on THE BOARD
• The average dollar value per player in a given system

We also break down how many pitching and position player prospects each team has within each Future Value tier. You can also sort on each batter and pitcher column within a given tier. Two-way prospects are split (0.5/0.5) between the batter and pitcher tiers for valuation purposes, as you can see below.

To navigate to the players contained within a particular team’s FV tier, just click on the number in the team’s row within that tier.

You’ll be automatically directed to the relevant part of THE BOARD — in this instance, Minnesota’s 13 hitting prospects with a 40 FV.

There’s some wiggle room in this otherwise fairly objective method of rankings farm systems, as two organizations with the same monetary total could end up being separated by which club has the higher per-prospect average. As we’ve discussed in the Trade Value Series and other places, all things being equal, teams would prefer that their WAR accumulate in as tight a time frame — and be concentrated in as few players — as possible. We don’t yet have an empirical way to express this, so for the time being, let’s say the the bonus you can give a system for concentration maxes out at about 10%.

We have a meaty roadmap of features we’d like add to the farm system rankings (more crosstab metadata on the makeup of a farm system, historical values, etc.), along with new columns and features we plan to add to THE BOARD before next season begins. Let us know what’s on your wishlist of new features to added by the wizard Sean Dolinar and the dark overlord David Appelman in the comments.

In my piece last week discussing the age-related demographics of the Trade Value Series, I included multiple graphs showing how baseball has changed over the years with respect to the quality and quantity of the contributions of younger and older players in the game. This is is one of the graphs from that piece:

This graph, and the others like it in the post, did a good job of showing age-related changes. But I thought there might be interest in the data underlying those graphs, data that would have been much too cumbersome to include in the piece. Below is the data that drove those graphs; it even breaks the ages down into smaller subsets. The numbers in all of the headers below represent player ages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Terrance Gore’s job is to come into games as a pinch-runner and steal bases. He might want to do more, but at the major league level, baserunning is his calling. Entering this season, Gore had totaled one hit, one walk, and one HBP in his career, including the postseason. Despite almost never reaching base, Gore has 32 career steals and had been caught just five teams before this year. Of his 61 appearances before 2019, 55 have come in September, when rosters are larger, or in the playoffs, when fewer pitchers are required. The Royals gave Gore a shot at slightly more playing time this year, but ultimately designated him for assignment. After he cleared waivers, he was traded to the New York Yankees for cash considerations, so Gore might once again loom large in September and the postseason.

What’s weird about Gore this season is that his stolen base numbers aren’t very good. He’s 13-of-18 on steals, and while that might be just fine for most players, when stealing bases is a huge part of your job, it’s really not that great. His sprint speed is one of the best in the game, so it’s pretty curious that he’s been caught stealing five times. Maybe teams are onto him, though that never stopped him before. Let’s take a closer look.

Gore’s first caught stealing happened on April 17 in the eighth inning. He didn’t get caught stealing so much as he got caught leaning as the photo shows below.

Gore’s next misadventure on the basepaths happened against the Yankees on April 21. Second one same as the first. Read the rest of this entry »